It has been reported that pain is most often the principal reason for pediatric patients to seek medical treatment. Pain management in children is a significant clinical problem. Post-operative pain or surgical pain is one type of pain that is sometimes undertreated to avoid potentially harmful side effects of analgesics in neonates after surgery. Chronic pain is another type of pain that also affects a significant amount of the pediatric population (15%-20%), and which imposes a substantial monetary burden on patients, families, and caregivers. Persistent changes in nociceptive processing occur as a result of early life injury specifically, and results from a “priming” effect due to the early injury and resulting pain.
Many of the pain therapies used in children such as opioids, for example, can not only be inadequate for pain relief, but also have inter-patient variability in clinical responses and can often produce significant adverse effects including nausea, vomiting, and respiratory depression (RD) in as many as 50% of pediatric patients and have been linked to the disrupted development of language skills, social behaviors and attention Usage of opioids or anti-inflammatories in utero have been linked to the improper development of language skills, social behaviors and attention, suggesting that such use should be limited or avoided entirely Thus, side effects often overshadow the analgesia desired from delivering these pharmacotherapies to children. Further, there is currently no efforts to avoid the long term consequences of pain in adulthood that results from priming as a result of pain early in life, which is not prevented using standard pain management therapies.
Hence, the development of more suitable pediatric pain therapies devoid of these adverse effects is of vital importance. However, to date, most analgesic development has been evolutionary, with refinements in compounds directed against well-known targets. Better drugs are clearly needed, but new targets for therapy must be determined before superior compounds can be developed.
The instant application seeks to address one or more of these needs in the art.